Re: message_hide-0.3

[Dmitry Borodaenko]

On 1/21/07, boud <address@hidden> wrote:
> However, i also added a bit more to common.css - "font-size: 70%".
> There are some pretty horrible things that get published, and IMHO it
> should be possible to make sure that people trying to discredit
> open publishing/open editing by showing openly published rubbish
> have a difficult time.

I agree in principle, but in practice this solution isn't very good.
First of all, the "hidden-message" class applies to the whole message,
including its info line which already is rendered in reduced font.
Goes to show that mixing representation and markup is always a bad
idea, and while strike-through is an example of markup with a clear
meaning, playing with font sizes is as representation-specific as it
gets. Font sizes and user's preferences vary greatly, and many sites
use annoyingly small fonts for no good reason, so any message you're
trying to convey by font size will most likely be lost in the noise.

One other thing that probably is worth doing is to hide images behind
a link the way it's done for pdfs and movies.

> Secondly, there's something missing from 0.6.0 (i haven't yet tried the new
> snapshot) is that old copies of a hidden article (if that article happens
> to be an article which has been openly edited, or edited by the non-anonymous
> author), then someone could still link to *old* versions of the article
> and innocent third parties would not necessarily realise that this is an
> old version of an article which later on became hidden - unless they click
> on "parent article".

Well-spotted, the issue is still there in the current version.

Once again, I can't agree with the proposed solution. Look at it from
RDF perspective. isVersionOf is a property that declares a certain
relation between to messages. This relation is external to both
messages, it can be added at one point and removed at another. The
rule that any version of a hidden message should also be treated as
hidden is even more external to the messages involved.

> From this follows that instead of applying irreversible changes to the
underlying data, we should infer this decision at run time, for
example, in Message#new.

--
Dmitry Borodaenko